“Only the mediocre are always at their best.” – Jean Giraudoux (1882 – 1944)
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Ticks
We recently found some ticks on dogs. Bode has had two and Sailor has had one. I also found a small one crawling on Daisy’s head last night. This is so strange because we have not had any ticks on dogs throughout the entire summer.
In Colorado, we would watch for ticks in the Spring. But, as soon as Summer came and it got hot and dry, we did not worry anymore. Here, we went the entire Spring and Summer without ticks, but now that Fall is here, we have seen several.
They come off pretty easy. I just grab them between my thumb and finger, apply gentle pressure and pull gently but firmly until they decide to release. I check to make sure I got their head out, then I squeeze the beejezus out of them and throw them away.
We put Frontline on all the dogs a few days ago, I hope that kicks in soon. Meantime, the dogs enjoy the extra “petting” they get when we go over them looking for ticks.
Posted under: Dog Stuff • by Rick on 09/24/2006 at 06:37 AM
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Friday, September 22, 2006
Finally, I Write
I listed some topics in my last post that I planned to treat with detailed entries and I recommitted myself to more frequent postings on this web site. Then, nothing happened. So, here are the long promised entries in abbreviated format:
Ellis Island Observations: I thought Ellis Island would be boring. Especially since I can’t track my ancestry to someone who came over on a boat in the lat 1800s or early 1900s. However, I found Ellis Island to be fascinating and prefer a visit there to the Statue of Liberty.
Sopranos: Many people seem to get their impression of New Jersey from watching the Sopranos. We’d never watched it until we moved here, and then bought the first season on DVD. It took us a while to get into it, but find it entertaining now. Is it reflective of real life in NJ? Maybe.
The show is often filmed in the area around our house and I was unable to get home by my normal route a month or so ago because the road was closed while they filmed for an upcoming episode.
Cicadas: The song of the cicadas started when the weather heated up this Summer. They are the indicators of summer, where the fireflies are the indicators of Spring. In mid-summer they were very loud. Now, as Summer wraps down and it gets cooler, they are fading, replaced by the crickets.
The bird: It was a broadwing hawk, not a perrigrin falcon.
Yes we get lots of weird mushrooms. After all, it is much wetter and more humid than Colorado. However, most are unfamiliar to me and I have not gotten into identification yet. Some are downright strange.
Pool maintenance: Take it slow. Don’t add too much of any thing at once 
That’s it for now.
Posted under: Stuff You Gotta Know! • by Rick on 09/22/2006 at 06:11 AM
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Friday, August 04, 2006
I Need to Write
I need to get back to updating my blog. Lynne has done such a great job with her blog that she has kept you up-to-date with what is going on in our lives. But, so much is happening and there are so many observations we need to capture, that I promise to start writing again. My articles may overlap with hers, so read both and get two perspectives. Ideas are:
Ellis Island Observations
Sopranos
The Cicadas and their Song
The Bird, maybe a Perrigrin Falcon?
The Weird Mushroom in the Back Yard
What I’ve Learned about Maintaining Pool
And so much more!
Posted under: New Jersey • by Rick on 08/04/2006 at 07:54 PM
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Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Dogs Drinking Slowly
If you read my previous post, you know that I brought a high-speed camera home with me this weekend. This morning, I took some movies of the dogs drinking from their water bowl. It is pretty fascinating to see how they roll their tongue back to create a large surface area on the water, dip it into the water, pull it up slowly, then gulp the water they’ve pulled up from the bowl. Here are three movies of three of the dogs.
All movies were shot with a Vision Research Phantom V7.1 color high-speed digital camera. I was using a Sigma 24-70mm F-mount lens. All movies were shot at f/4. I used two 250W Northstar lights. The movie of Sailor is in super slow-motion, at least compared to the other two. It was shot at 1000 frames-per-second with a 100 microsecond exposure time. You’ll notice that it is a little washed-out. That is because it was dark, so I tried to lighten it up some by adjusting the brightness and contrast after the fact. I’m not very good at this stuff yet, so the pictures aren’t as good as a pro could get them, but you can sure see the act of drinking!
Update: I uploaded a new movie of Sailor that is exactly 1000 frames long. This means that everything you see in this movie occured in 1 second in “real life”. I count three full slurps of water in 1 second!
For the movies of Daisy and Bode, I changed the frame rate to 500 frames-per-second (so they move along a little faster). And, the exposure to 200 microseconds, giving me a little more light to work with. Now, you can see that I have some parts of the scene (the white on the dog, for example) that are overexposed. I could have fixed this in the camera if I had been paying more attention. (A feature called Extreme Dynamic Range). But, they are what they are from a quality perspective. I’m learning and will get better!
The movies are in Quicktime format using the h.264 codec. If you can’t view the movies, download and install the latest version of Quicktime from www.apple.com/quicktime. And, they are about 32MB in size, so give them some time to load.
Hope you enjoy!
Posted under: Dog Stuff • Stuff You Gotta Know! • by Rick on 07/04/2006 at 08:13 AM
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Monday, July 03, 2006
Ever Seen Popcorn Pop?
It is the long Independence Day weekend, so I brought home a camera from my new job and spent an hour or so on Saturday shooting movies of popcorn popping. It is one of those things you “seen” a thousand times but never really seen. Anyway, in the two movies that I link to below, you can see popcorn popping.
Both shots were made with a Vision Research Phantom v7.1 color high-speed digital camera. I used a Nikon 105mm AF Micro Nikkon lens. Both were shot at 3000 pictures-per-second with a per-picture exposure time of 50 microseconds. The popcorn was lit with two Northstar 250W lights. The first picture was shot an at aperature setting of 5.6 the second at 8 for a slightly greater depth-of-field. Both images are 512 X 512 pixels.
The movies are in Quicktime format and range from about 3.5MB to 3.9MB, so allow time for a download. You’ll need the h.264 codec available in Quicktime version 7. Let me know if you have any trouble viewing the movies and I can encode them differently (I was going to the greatest quality at the smallest file size.)
This one ends up a little out of focus, but pops very fast and I love the droplets of hot oil flying through the air.
This one has better focus and the kernel of popcorn stays in the frame! Which is pretty amazing. Notice the swirl of steam toward the end of the shot.
Posted under: Stuff You Gotta Know! • by Rick on 07/03/2006 at 01:50 PM
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